Click Fraud — An Insider Look

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece going inside the world of click fraud. It includes the record of a phone call the reporter had with someone calling themselves 'Kiss' who operates many pay to click and parked sites. From the article: 'Reached by telephone, Kiss says that his registration name is false and declines to reveal the real one. He says he's the 23-year-old son of computer technicians and has studied finance. He owns about 20 paid-to-read sites, he says, as well as 200 parked sites stuffed with Google and Yahoo advertisements ... He claims to take in $70,000 in ad revenue a month, but says that only 10% of that comes from PTRs. The rest, he says, reflects legitimate clicks by real Web surfers. He refrains from more PTR activity, he claims, because it's no good for advertisers, no good for Google, no good for Yahoo."

Comments

10-15%?

[Eric Savage]

So 10-15% of clicks are fake, and over time this number will fluctuate up or down, never reaching zero. But the important thing is that this means 85%-90% of clicks are legitimately interested people, assuming your ad is clear and accurate, which is the responsibility of the advertiser. Anyone who has ever worked with advertising should know that spending ad dollars with quantifiable results that high is a marketer's wet dream.